The Children’s Stories of E. B. White

SDG

No one can write a sentence like White.
— James Thurber

Just as no writer or editor can do without a
copy of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, so no
child’s library is complete without one or more of the latter
writer’s beloved trilogy of children’s books: Stuart
Little (1945), Charlotte’s Web (1952), and Trumpet
of the Swan (1970).

In these books, E. B. White practices what he preaches in
The Elements of Style, turning out graceful, crisp prose
as pleasurable for adult readers as for children, and doing so
with considerable charm and power.

Even without the winsome
illustrations of Garth Williams (for Stuart Little and
Charlotte’s Web) and Edward Frascino (for Trumpet of
the Swan; newer editions feature the art of Fred Marcellino),
White’s vivid descriptions create indelible pictures in their own
right: mouselike little Stuart on the end of a string searching
the bathtub drain for Mrs. Little’s lost ring; Wilbur the pig
trying to spin a web by leaping off the manure pile with a string
tied to his tail; the magic notes of "There’s a Small Hotel"
hanging in the air as Louis the swan plays his trumpet for
spellbound passers-by in the Ritz lobby.

The books are also educational. It was from White that I first
learned the nautical terms "jib" and "yaw," and that some spiders
"balloon" or fly through the air using strands of silk as a kite,
and that a male swan is called a cob and a baby swan a
cygnet.

Due to a combination of factors, including the 1973 animated
film, Charlotte’s Web has perhaps always been the
best-known of the three — at least until 1999, when Columbia’s
big-budget Stuart Little made its mark, leading to this
year’s sequel. An uninspired 2001 animated take on Trumpet of
the Swan did little, alas, to elevate the standing of White’s
third, least-known tale.

It’s ironic that Hollywood has lavished its most elaborate
efforts on the first and least interesting of White’s trilogy,
while performing decently on the middle work and finally
disappointing on White’s third, best story. At least, that’s how
I see it: I find that White got better over time, so that
Charlotte’s Web was a substantial improvement over
Stuart Little, while The Trumpet of the Swan is by
far the best of the three.

Stuart Little (1945)

To tell the truth, I don’t even like the book
Stuart Little. I never have. I first read it when I was in
fourth grade, I guess, and didn’t like it even then. I’ve read it
a couple of times as an adult (once a few years ago when my
eldest daughter was reading White’s later two children’s books,
and once more recently preparing to review the two Columbia
pictures). I still don’t like it. Fortunately, the 1999 picture
and its new sequel are freely revisionistic and don’t at all
suffer from the book’s weaknesses.

My problems with White’s book start with his protagonist. It’s
not the ambiguity about exactly what Stuart is, or where he comes
from, that bothers me. I can accept that Stuart is an
anthropomorphic rodent, or a rodentomorphic human, or whatever;
and that, however it came about, he is the son of Mr. and Mrs.
Frederick Little, and the younger brother of George Little. It’s
not this premise that bothers me, but what White does with it -
or rather doesn’t do.

To begin with, Stuart forms no meaningful attachments to any
of his family members. Unlike Wilbur with Fern or Louis with his
parents in the later books, Stuart doesn’t seem to need
his family members in any significant way. He arrives in his
family quite self-sufficient, both emotionally and
physically.

Naturally, due to his crushingly small stature, he benefits
from various accomodations offered by his parents (e.g., a tiny
wooden mallet to turn the bathroom sink on and off) — just as
would be the case with any physically challenged individual.

But he doesn’t need their nurture or support; he has nothing
to learn from them; he doesn’t grow or mature as a person under
their care. And when, roughly halfway through the book, he
strikes out on his own, he does so without telling a soul, or
even sparing a single backward glance or tear.

In fact, prior to his short-lived relationship with the bird
Margalo, Stuart develops no meaningful attachments of any kind
with anyone or anything. He hardly even has motivations for his
actions. For example, after the episode in which Stuart goes down
the drain after his mother’s earring, White tells us that
everyone "thought he had been awfully good about the whole
thing," but we never learn what Stuart himself thought, or why he
did it. We only know that he was willing to go after his father
proposed it. It wasn’t even like he proposed the idea himself,
either for his mother’s sake or for sheer curiosity.

Later, in the beginning of the chapter that contains the
memorable model-boat race, we read that Stuart wants to take a
bus to 78th Street, but are not told why. It’s simply presented
as an exercise in logistics. When he gets to the park, he sees a
boat he likes (the Wasp), approaches the owner, and asks for
work. (White explains parenthetically that Stuart loved the feel
of the wind in his face and the deck beneath his feet, though as
far as we’ve seen this is Stuart’s first time away from
home.)

When the owner of the Wasp points out another boat on the lake
(the Lillian B. Womrath) and tells Stuart that he hates that
boat, Stuart at once exclaims, "Then so do I!" — though he has no
reason to hate her. Later, returning home after the race,
Stuart says nothing of his adventures to anyone ("Knocking around
town" is his answer when asked where he’s been).

At this point, Stuart is simply drifting through life rather
like the antihero of Camus’ The Stranger, devoid of
attachments, passions, or motivations, acting as if for sheer
lack of reason to do otherwise. There’s nothing to connect to
here in any moral way, except perhaps pluck in overcoming
obstacles.

But then Stuart finds something to care about: Margalo. Stuart
is positively smitten with the bird. Shortly, however, Margalo
gets an anonymous tip that her life is in danger, and flees
without telling anyone where or why, leaving Stuart
heartbroken.

The rest of the book, in one way or another, concerns Stuart’s
longings for Margalo. It’s to search for the bird that Stuart
leaves his family without a word, just as Margalo left him; and
after he leaves home there is no mention whatsoever of his
family.

Stuart’s longing for Margalo is also perhaps behind a
devastating climactic episode in which he meets a girl named
Harriet Ames, who is of his own small proportions but human in
appearance. Their abortive date goes awry partly through caprice
and partly through Stuart’s own immaturity, petulance, and
refusal to roll with life’s punches (not that the book seeks to
eke any lesson out of the event).

The end of the book finds Stuart alone, driving randomly north
with no particular hope of finding his beloved bird, who by this
time seems more a symbol of something or other than a figure in
the story. Evoking the desperate philosophy that "to travel
hopefully is better than to arrive," White concludes
optimistically that Stuart felt sure he was going in the "right"
direction (not necessarily to find Margalo, but in some vaguer
sense). The narrative simply trails off, with no true climax or
dramatic resolution.

What’s the driving vision here? That life is full of
disappointments and unfulfilled dreams, but you have to go on
anyway? Perhaps, but what about Stuart’s almost unbroken
emotional isolation, his self-sufficiency, his lack of any need
to learn or grow? One might almost think the story a tragedy of a
doomed outsider, if it weren’t so whimsical and didn’t end with
such an optimistic sentiment.

Call me crazy — tell me to lighten up and remember that it’s
just a children’s book — but I find Stuart Little
depressingly anti-humanistic. What’s more, I think my
fourth-grade dislike for the book was rooted in essentially the
same factors (though of course I wouldn’t have been able to
diagram them as I have here).

Not that the book is devoid of redeeming merit. Stuart’s
adventures are often entertaining to read, and readers may find
value in the theme of the "little guy" overcoming obstacles.
Literarily, too, Stuart Little is far superior to much
popular children’s literature; it can certainly be recommended as
an exemplar of fine writing. Still, this is that rare case in
which the movie (directed by The Lion King’s Rob Minkoff)
is more enjoyable than the book — and the sequel is more
enjoyable than the original.

Charlotte’s Web (1952)

Not surprisingly, I like White’s
Charlotte’s Web quite a bit better than Stuart
Little. In fact, Wilbur the pig is in some ways the polar
opposite of Stuart: on the runtish side, to be sure, but entirely
lacking in Stuart’s emotional inaccessibility and
self-sufficiency.

Wilbur arrives on the scene a proper baby, needing care and
nurture, and, when the time comes for his mistress Fern to leave
him at the Zuckerman farm, he misses her terribly and is
desperately lonely, until he meets Charlotte the spider.

Wilbur and Charlotte have a much more satisfying relationship
than poor Stuart and Margalo, and Charlotte is certainly a true
friend, as well as a good writer. Birth, death, friendship,
sacrifice, grieving, growing up, the thirst for life, and the
necessity of taking life (spiders eating insects, humans eating
farm animals) are all thoughtfully explored in Charlotte’s
Web. There’s something earthy and practical and wise about
this book.

Yet there are also weaknesses. For one thing, if Stuart lacked
motivations for his actions, Wilbur has the opposite problem: He
has definite motivations, but doesn’t do anything about
them. Instead, he depends entirely on others — Fern, Charlotte,
even Templeton the rat — to do what needs doing. As a
protagonist, Wilbur comes off rather weak, passive, and, alas,
uninteresting, right to the end. Charlotte celebrates his
supposed virtues in her web, but the only one that rings remotely
true is "humble." The others are pure PR spin.

Secondly, even though Wilbur cares about Fern and Charlotte,
his driving motives are entirely self-consumed. Essentially, he
wants two things: not to die, and not to be lonely. The drama of
Wilbur’s life is entirely taken up with these two desires; other
people’s needs and desires never enter into the equation. Wilbur
is thus never given the chance to rise to nobility or
selflessness — to sacrifice for those who have sacrificed for
him.

This weakness is nowhere more glaring than in a climactic
scene at the county fair, in which Charlotte has successfully
saved Wilbur’s life by weaving one final word into her web in
Wilbur’s temporary pen. Then comes the revelation that Charlotte,
after spending all night on her magnum opus, her egg sac,
is dying and won’t be returning to the barn with Wilbur.

Frantic with worry, Wilbur is spurred to the single decisive
act of his life: He bribes Templeton the rat to retrieve
Charlotte’s egg sac from the stall and carry it to his crate, so
Charlotte’s babies will hatch back at the Zuckerman farm.

And why does Wilbur do this? Because the eggs are in danger?
Because (let us say) the fair is closing and the enclosures might
be disassembled or cleaned, and all 514 of Charlotte’s babies
could die, all because Charlotte agreed to come to the fair for
Wilbur’s sake? It would have been easy for White to gloss the
event thus, so that Wilbur could have a single moment of selfless
generosity with which to repay Charlotte for her kindness to
him.

But no: There’s no hint that Charlotte’s babies might be at
any risk at the fairgrounds (indeed, there is some danger of
Templeton harming them in transit). Rather, Wilbur wants them to
hatch in the barn solely for his own sake, so that he won’t be
lonely after Charlotte dies.

Wilbur’s passiveness and self-absorption suffer not only in
contrast to the much more admirable hero of White’s third book,
The Trumpet of the Swan, but also in contrast to another
porcine protagonist who aspires to be more than bacon: Babe, the
hero of Dick King-Smith’s novel The Sheep-Pig and the celebrated 1995
film Babe. Plucky,
concerned about others, and above all an active player on Hoggett
Farm, Babe is everything that passive, histrionic Wilbur isn’t.
Babe faces challenges, makes friends with everyone on the farm
without accepting their mutual prejudices, and even helps bring
about a kind of rapprochement between sheep and sheep-dog.
Along the way, he learns a life skill, and even takes on a pack
of rustling sheep-dogs (at least in the movie).

Next to Babe, Wilbur looks like a whiner who just happened to
make friends with a smart spider. Wilbur is the protagonist of
Charlotte’s Web, but the real hero is the title
character.

Yet, like Stuart Little, Charlotte is a hero with no needs and
only one real attachment, in this case Wilbur. Even her
relationship with Wilbur is all one way: She gives, and he takes.
That may make her more admirable than Wilbur, but it doesn’t make
her any more accessible than Stuart.

White’s story is respectably and faithfully adapted in the
1973 cartoon, directed by Charles A. Nichols and Iwao Takamoto;
which means that both the strengths and the weaknesses of the
book apply to the film.

The Trumpet of the Swan (1970)

Like Stuart and Wilbur, the hero of White’s
final children’s book starts out life challenged: Louis is a
Trumpeter swan who can’t trumpet. This handicap, which will
prevent Louis from wooing a mate, so distresses his loving
parents that Louis’s father flies to a nearby town, raids a music
store, and steals a trumpet for his son. When Louis realizes that
his father has sacrificed his honor to provide Louis with a
voice, he goes out into the world and works as a musician until
he has earned enough to work off the debt.

In this deceptively simple storyline is more of humanity and
life and virtue than in the two earlier books combined. In fact,
Louis goes through the same stages of life that most of us do:
carefree childhood dependent upon one’s parents; education (Louis
goes to school to learn to read and write, something neither
Stuart nor Charlotte needed to do); gradually increasing
responsibility (each of Louis’s jobs pays better than the
previous one, though it also tends to be less enjoyable) leading
to increased independence; courtship, marriage, parenthood.

Because of this structure, the story is suffused with such
themes as parental sacrifice for offspring and filial gratitude
toward parents, honesty and honor, pluck and initiative, delayed
gratification, hard work and reward, learning to face obstacles
and overcome handicaps, and, above all, love and the pursuit of
love.

Other themes include friendship (Louis is befriended by a
young boy named Sam who helps the swan as Charlotte helped
Wilbur, yet without doing everything for him); beauty and art
(Louis’s trumpet, like Charlotte’s web, is his self-expression as
well as his livelihood); and valor in the face of danger (Louis
risks his life to save a boy from drowning, and later takes on a
pair of zookeepers to protect his beloved Serena, and his father
risks life and limb more than once).

Louis is the only one of White’s heroes who has a real family
life with parents and siblings. His father, the old cob, with his
excessively flowery language and flair for the melodramatic, may
seem rather ridiculous next to Louis’s sensible, insightful,
down-to-earth mother — yet he’s also genuinely brave and
involved, to the genuine admiration of his mate ("What a swan!"
she thinks at one point).

Louis is the also the only one of White’s heroes who faces the
challenges and responsibilities of adulthood. Stuart is no more a
responsible adult than carefree Mole or Rat of The Wind in the
Willows (though he has more angst); and Wilbur remains in a
sort of perpetual adolescence. Louis sets realistic but
fulfilling goals and takes action to bring them about, in
contrast to Wilbur (who sat around letting other people solve his
problems) and Stuart (whose impossible quest had no real hope of
success).

The Trumpet of the Swan is also practical about money.
Readers follow Louis’s earnings as he works off his father’s
debt, but we also see his expenditures. For example, in his final
job at a Philadelphia jazz club, Louis makes $500 a week, but has
to pay his agent 10 percent. At the end of the story, White
tallies up all of Louis’s earnings and all his expenditures,
providing a full accounting of the final contents of the money
bag.

White sets up this theme of cost-gain economics with an
amusing classroom scene that recalls the chapter in Stuart
Little in which Stuart acts as a substitute teacher for a
day. Yet whereas the scene in the earlier book was merely silly
and didn’t connect with anything else in the story, Sam’s
math-class scene illustrates the necessity of accounting for
real-world conditions (e.g., a man who walks three miles in an
hour isn’t necessarily going to walk 12 miles in four hours, for
any number of reasons).

One of the book’s few weaknesses is the thinness of Serena as
a character, which requires us to accept Louis’s devotion to her
on faith. Despite this flaw, White’s treatment of Louis’s
feelings for Serena is genuinely romantic, and the climactic
scene in which he finally woos her is magnificent — as
triumphantly successful as Stuart’s abortive date with Harriet
Ames was disastrous.

Some children may be confused by a plot device late in the
story, in which Louis, who clearly values his own freedom, makes
a deal that involves having some of his future progeny raised in
captivity. This development is best explained to children by
minimizing the anthropomorphism of White’s birds: Louis and
Serena are wild swans and want to remain free, but Louis’s future
cygnets will be born at the zoo, so their remaining there would
be just like any other zoo animals born into captivity.

The theft of the trumpet is also obviously a moral sticking
point. Of course Louis makes up the debt, but that doesn’t
entirely resolve the difficulty. Here once again it may be
convenient to fall back on the fact that Louis’s father is after
all a swan and not a human being, since animals can’t be guilty
of wrongdoing! However, a drawback to this is that the cob
expressly describes his actions in moral terms.

Still another potentially problematic point concerns Louis’s
human friend Sam, a private boy who doesn’t tell his father about
his adventures at the swan lake. If Sam’s secrecy never quite
becomes a full-blooded lie, it comes awfully close. All of these
are points that parents may want to discuss with their
children.

Still, the book’s virtues more than compensate for its
drawbacks. Writing almost 20 years after the completion of
Charlotte’s Web, White was at the peak of his literary
powers, and The Trumpet of the Swan rings with lyric
beauty and and romantic feeling. Few children’s books of this
sort are as rich and as much fun to read as this one.

An old rabbinic tradition proposes that King Solomon wrote
Song of Songs in the ardor of youth, Proverbs in practical
maturity, and Ecclesiastes in the despair of old age. A
countervailing Christian tradition finds different significance
in another sequence: According to this tradition, Solomon wrote
Proverbs to instruct the young in elementary principles,
Ecclesiastes to challenge the mature to contemplate deeper
issues, and Song of Songs to express the highest truths known to
the most advanced souls.

E. B. White published Start Little in his mid-forties,
Charlotte’s Web in his fifties, and The Trumpet of the
Swan in his seventies. Like Solomon in the Christian
tradition, White ended his trilogy with the most exalted and
suffused by love, The Trumpet of the Swan. (Stuart
Little, with its aimless structure, caprice, and empty final
quest, is most reminiscent of Ecclesiastes; while Charlotte’s
Web, with its practical title character and attention to the
ordinary stuff of life, is closest in spirit to Proverbs.)

It’s a great pity that this wonderful children’s book was so
shortchanged by the banal 2001 cartoon, directed by Terry L. Noss
and Richard Rich (who were also responsible for the equally
mediocre The Swan Princess, which at least had elegant
swans). Perhaps someday a better production will do The
Trumpet of the Swan better justice.